Our approach

The objective of the estate is to produce wines that combine structure and finesse, concentration and charm. This balance must be achieved, while respecting the personality of the terroir and the vintage. To do this, it's necessary to show a great deal of respect at each stage of the wine-making process. And that must start in the vineyard!

Various
procedures are implemented to realise these objectives: our viticulture
seeks to favour the natural balances and reveal the terroir, yields
are kept under control, harvesting is carried out carefully by hand and grapes
are sorted prior to our winemaking procedure characterised by minimum
interference. This encourages the fineness, the expression of the fruit and the personality of each wine rather than just extraction. Maturing is carried out carefully, with the extensive but controlled use of new casks. The wines are bottled without being fined or filtered.

Have a look at our practices in more detail, from the vineyard to bottling. Each stage is important and has its role to play in the production of a great wine.

Work in the
vineyard

Even if the estate has no official certification, its practices are those
of organic viticulture: the use of approved products only, the
ploughing of the soil, an intimate knowledge of each vineyard plot,
precision vinegrowing which seeks to prevent diseases and keep yields under
control.

These practices are demanding and time-consuming;
they aim at a balance between the vines and their environment, the expression
of the terroir and the climate specific to each vintage. Sometimes the
pressure of diseases is too strong or the environment of the plot is too
restrictive: a synthetic molecule may then be used, but only as a last resort,
as material or human means are always favoured.

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Work in the
vineyard

The pruning must
meet numerous objectives: to produce grapes, but also to ensure the plant's
equilibrium and, if possible, to avoid diseases, particularly those affecting
the wood, that have multiplied in recent years.

Of course, if it
were just a question of pruning short, so as to maintain a reasonable yield, things
would be too simple. On the contrary, in order to ensure that the leaves absorb
enough light and that the bunches have enough air, you have to prune long; but
obviously, to avoid the vines being subsequently overloaded, it will be
necessary in May to eliminate some buds or branches on the canes thus pruned.

To keep the
sap-flow within the plant well balanced, you must make sure that "eyes” are
maintained on both sides of the row, as these will ensure the renewal of the producing
branches.

It's very easy
to imagine the extra work: on the one hand, an almost machine-like cut of the
secateurs is enough; on the other, it's necessary to intervene at different
times with the reasoned management of each vine. In such circumstances, any
mechanisation, already difficult, becomes impossible.

This work,
moreover, would be wasted if during the vegetative cycle, we didn't go through
the vines (up to 4 times), row by row, separating the branches to keep them
from becoming entwined: the vine is a creeper and it clings to whatever it can
find. So in this case, you have to contradict it. Along the same lines, we
realized that raising the height of the foliage and eliminating the leaves
at the bottom led to better aeration of the area where the grapes grow and
increased ripeness. Indeed, the leaves at the top are more active at the end of
the season, because they are younger (a universal principle...), and this occurs at a
critical moment, when the leaves play their part in accumulating sugar in the
grapes. So it's worth the trouble to plan an extra intervention...

Organic
viticulture obviously requires increased attention, too: the products are less
effective, which means that you must be more vigilant, continually observe the
vines and acquire a keen knowledge of the plots. Keeping the weeds under
control is tedious work: no more herbicide, which you must admit was very
practical (those of you with gardens will know what I mean): it's necessary to
plough five times a year. And the horse is being reintroduced in difficult places, without forgetting the
manual interventions at the end of the season, if the summer has been wet...

Our principal
preoccupation in the summer, once the vine's growth cycle has begun to slow
down, is green harvesting. Of course, by then, we have already taken preventive action.
But at the same time, we've allowed ourselves some room to manoeuvre should
anything go badly wrong... So it's necessary to be able to readjust the harvest by
eliminating grapes either that will not ripen, whatever the circumstances, or
that will prevent the others from ripening. This must be carried out
discerningly, and there are priorities to respect, given that each vine is
different!

The grape harvest

The harvest
itself takes place in mid-September, at a date which has been carefully fixed, and
everything must be implemented so that when the grapes arrive in the vat, they
are as intact, as ripe and as healthy as possible.

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The
grape harvest

The month leading up to the grape
harvest is a worrying time for the winegrower: his capacity to react is
limited, given that the slightest climatic variation will have its consequences
on the quality of the vintage. The date of the harvest obeys several
constraints: to have the ripest and healthiest fruit possible, to take
advantage of the best possible weather and to manage the harvest team in the
best possible way.

There is a reference point that helps
us: the length of the vegetative cycle. Traditionally, people talk about 100
days after flowering (oh yes, the vine has flowers too: without them there
would be no fruit! They're very small flowers, so not very spectacular, but
they give off an absolutely bewitching scent). But this traditional reference
point lacks precision: from when do you start counting? Our observations, made
on the basis of rigorous counting, would seem to indicate a period of 97-8 days,
rather, once the flowering is completely finished. Obviously, that will vary
according to the vintage.

The object of the game - and believe me,
it resembles one - is to obtain grapes of maximum ripeness. However, we don't
believe in over-ripeness, which some will seek for in the name of hypothetical
phenolic ripeness, with grapes harvested 5-7 days after the end of the
vegetative cycle: in our opinion, the resulting wines lack aromatic freshness
and tend to be boring. Nor will we ever harvest on the basis of the acidity:
Burgundy remains a northerly region and there's no shortage of it.

The optimum ripeness for Pinot Noir in
Burgundy is situated somewhere around 13% ABV. At this level, you generally
obtain a good concentration of the sugar, which allows you to produce
voluptuous wines, and there's still enough acidity to preserve the freshness.
Phenolic ripeness, the real ripeness of the fruit (through observing the skin,
the pips, etc.), as opposed to the simple concentration of the sugar, is an
attractive notion, but one that is difficult to determine. It can be approached
by observing the vines and tasting the grapes and the juice.

The weather represents the big element
of uncertainty in the month of September. Observations gleaned over the years provide
us with some points of reference: the average number of hours of sunlight, the amount
of rain which falls during the month leading up to the harvest. Keeping these
statistics doesn't help to reduce the feeling of powerlessness that you
experience in the month of September; at the very most, it's a diversion... The
winegrower becomes dependent on weather forecasts, that he may listen to
several times a day, despite their poor reliability.

You need to be able to put back the date
of the grape harvest if a period of fine weather sets in, even belatedly: in
that way, you benefit from a concentrating effect. On the other hand, you have
to bring it forward if a depression is forecast. If it's wet, the spectre of
rot is on the prowl, and there's no time to lose in the struggle between rot
and ripeness; it's then a question of either picking not very ripe grapes or
losing significant quantities of the harvest.

Nature can play other tricks to add a
little spice to the process: an inexplicable difference in ripeness between the
Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir, a last-minute invasion of parasites...

Managing a team of grape-pickers is a
delicate task: suddenly the number of people goes from 10-12 to 100. A good
atmosphere is necessary, and many have been with us for a long time, but you
have to get everyone, people who don't know one another and who don't know the
job, to coexist and work together

People's goodwill is frequently called
upon when the harvest date changes and everyone must remain available in spite
of their professional and family constraints... When it rains, we don't harvest
as it's essential not to bring in wet grapes, but that's not good for the
pay... And when the weather's fine, it's difficult to explain why we are
waiting...

Life is intense during the month of
September, the scenario of the ripening vintage is rewritten several times,
tension mounts and culminates when the grapes are picked, decidedly the high
point of the year.

The means of harvesting, far from being
neutral, plays it role in quality, just like the way the vines are trained and
the wines are made.

First of all, the harvest must necessarily
be manual, for the simple reason that it's not possible to sort a harvest done
by machine, and unless the vintage is homogeneous (which is rarely the case)
that can prove disastrous.

The grapes are therefore sorted on a
table in the winery before being put into the vat. Sometimes we might also ask
the pickers to do pre-sorting in the vineyard. In general, we try to avoid
this, because they don't always do it discerningly and also, we want the
picking to take place quickly; it's a quality factor.

In the winery, there's a team of 6 to 12
people at the sorting table, usually supervised by JNM, who remove the damaged
or insufficiently ripe grapes. The proportion thus eliminated varies between 5
and 20% according to the vintage or the appellation.

Another basic principle, also incompatible
with the use of the machine, must guide harvest: bringing into the winery
grapes which are as intact as possible. We therefore use crates that contain
between 15 and 20 kg of harvest to avoid too much pressure being exerted on the
grapes. They must then be transported gently: the crates are loaded onto a
tipper truck, which will shake the grapes much less than a trailer hooked up to
a tractor. These trays have holes in them: the juice which escapes due to the
weight of the harvest, which nonetheless is kept to a minimum, is thus
eliminated, which is a good thing, as it has had time to oxidise during
transport.

Vinification

Temperature control is the fundamental
contribution that modern techniques have made to our craft which has otherwise
remained very traditional. It enables us to produce wine with "charm”, even if
an over-standardised style of vinification would quickly lead to
trivialisation.

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Vinification

The grapes are left to macerate at a low
temperature (about 15°C or 60°F) for 3 to 5 days before the juice begins to
ferment naturally. During the fermentation, temperatures are controlled (but
not directed), so that they do not go above the critical threshold of 34-35°C
(around 95°F), beyond which the activity of the yeasts might slow down or even
stop.

At the beginning, we practise what is
called pumping over, in other words pumping the juice from the bottom of the
vat so as to spray the grapes which are at the top. Then towards the end of the
fermentation, we begin to carry out pigeages,
which means forcing the berries (the "cap”) down into the fermenting juice.
This presses them slightly and liberates the seeds and thus the tannins.

It's better if this fermentation cycle,
which lasts from two to three weeks, comes to an end gradually, and the
concrete vats, which guarantee more reliable sterilisation from one harvest to
the next than wooden vats, help us to maintain warmer temperatures that
decrease slowly.

Not much extracting is done, nor is the
harvest processed or pushed around too much: very little sulphur, very little
chaptalisation or acidification, with pigeages
only at the end of the fermentation.

In this way, the individuality of each
wine can express itself..., but the grapes must be of excellent quality to
begin with!

Maturing

The game is not over at the end of the
vinification. The way in which the wine is matured in casks, during which time
a second fermentation (malolactic, "la
malo”) takes place, can greatly influence the presentation and stability of
the wine, and thus its ageing potential.

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Maturing

Whether to use new oak casks or not is
an important decision: a cask enables a wine to oxidise gently through the
pores of the wood, which stabilises it, but also brings aromas that blend
together with those of the wine..., or become dominant. A cask that has already
been used leaves less of a "mark” on the wine, but after a few years, loses its
powers of aeration, as the pores and the chinks between the pieces of wood
gradually become blocked.

If you decide to put a wine in new
casks, the toasting, the type of oak (origin, technical characteristics) must
be adapted to the appellation, not to mention the proportion used. Adapting the
proportion of new casks to the vintage is not reliable; the character of each
wine as it emerges over the years is a far better indicator.

Other circumstances are also very
important: when and how quickly the malolactic fermentation (not induced) takes
place, the interaction with the lees, managing the rackings and the degree of
aeration you want your wines to have... Each stage must be carefully thought
out.

Bottling

The last stage, but not the least: after
that, no more intervention is possible! So it's necessary to make sure that
each cuvée is correctly "tuned”: its
aromatic openness, how it performs on the palate, the protection it needs,
without forgetting the choice of corks, the bottling conditions, etc.

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Bottling

The wines are racked, the different
casks of the same appellation are brought together in a tank 3 to 4 weeks
beforehand and the bottling takes place after a maturing period in casks of
seventeen months on average (the wines of year 1 are bottled between January
and July of year 3).

During this period, they are tasted
several times in order to judge their readiness: we know them, we know what
they are capable of achieving and can judge whether they need extra aeration,
more time, etc... Some technical parameters (temperature, levels of CO2,
SO2, etc.) are also monitored.

Generally speaking, the period for
bottling is determined in advance according to the lunar calendar... But you must
be able to adapt to the weather (never bottle during a depression), to the
availability of manpower, etc.

The wines are bottled by gravity without
any filtration, a longer (the clarification takes place naturally and over time)
but much more respectful process. With the occasional exception (particularly
for the whites), there is no fining, as the wines don't need it for their
stability. In this way, they suffer no trauma. Always the same general
principal at the estate: respect the raw material, treat the wine for what it
is, a living substance which demands consideration.

A modern bottling chain enables us to
take all the necessary precautions in order to ensure high-quality corking and
thus the good ageing of our wines: washing and inerting the bottles, a vacuum
between the wine and the cork to avoid high pressure, equal levels of wine. The
corks are carefully selected and strict specifications are imposed on our
suppliers. Ah, corks! They are such a source of worry for the vine-grower and
the wine-lover... Their ability to ruin the work of several years is
particularly frustrating; year by year, we reinforce our controls.

After the bottling, the vine-grower's
work is finished, so to speak: it's then up to the wine-lover to ensure optimum
storage (15°C or 60°F) maximum) and drinking conditions, but that's another
story...